The register rules: Balor

Evidence dossier 059 — Balor. Every exhibit catalogued, every ruling stated with its grounds.

At a Glance

• Canonical form: Balor
• Original script: —
• Pantheon: Celtic
• Convention: the tradition’s own scholarly transliteration standard
• False forms on record: 0
• Contested forms: none attested
• Series: The Canonical Register, No. 59 of 397

The Evidence

Exhibit 1 — the attestation. The tradition's record preserves this name in its romanized scholarly form: Balor — no older script survives to transcribe, so the canonical content is the exactness of the spelling itself.

Exhibit 2 — the flattened form. The plain form balor differs from the canonical Balor only by convention of display — case, not content. It is acceptable everywhere: in legacy systems, in plain-text citation, in the DNS itself. What is not acceptable is what follows in the register: respellings that change the letters, not just their case.

Exhibit 3 — the physical record. Balor is a textual and oral figure: no ogham stone names him, no votive inscription invokes him, and Irish paganism generally left literature rather than dedications. His manuscript witnesses are exact — Cath Maige Tuired survives uniquely in the sixteenth-century British Library MS Harley 5280, the basis of Gray's edition, while Lebor Gabála Érenn is preserved in the twelfth-century Book of Leinster and its sister codices. His geographical anchor is one of the most dramatic pieces of coastline in Europe: Tory Island (Toraigh), nine miles off the Bloody Foreland of Donegal, whose cliffs and sea-stacks — above all the great rock called Tór Mór — the oral tradition names as Balor's fortress and the site of Eithne's tower. The nineteenth-century collectors who wrote the tower story down were recording a living Donegal tradition anchored to those rocks, and the island's medieval monastic remains and round tower have kept the name in continuous local memory.

Exhibit 4 — the continuing record. Balor entered the modern world through two doors. The first was scholarship: Lady Gregory's Gods and Fighting Men (1904) carried the sling-stone and the tower into English reading, and O'Rahilly's Early Irish History and Mythology (1946) made him the type-case of the Irish death-king, a scholarly afterlife as large as his medieval dossier is short.

The Convention's Own History

Every tradition in this register has its own scholarly transliteration standard, built by its own specialists over decades or centuries, and the register follows each on its own terms: the tradition’s own standard. The principle that unifies them is the one the whole project stands on: a name is evidence, and evidence is not negotiable — not for keyboards, not for convenience, not for anyone.

The Protocol's Position

Can the canonical form live in the address bar? Almost always, yes. IDNA 2008 admits every mark this register defends — the DNS stores them as `xn--` punycode and modern browsers render them natively. The real frictions are practical, not legal: some registrars stock only part of the IDN space, so a theoretically valid name can be temporarily unbuyable; and stacked combinations (an acute riding a macron) remain awkward to type on mobile keyboards even where the protocol accepts them.

The project's answer is a ranked ladder, not a compromise: the full restoration first, then attested fallbacks in descending order of completeness. The ladder's lowest rung, plain ASCII, is a vehicle for legacy systems — sanctioned, but never presented as the scholarly form.

The Verdict

Case closed on Balor: canonical, cited, and defended. The keyboard form balor is the same name in another register of display — always acceptable. The register's files remain open: if a source surfaces that changes any line of this entry, the entry changes. Until then, the temple at /sites/balor/ holds the canonical form.

The docket for this ruling: no false forms on the docket; no contested forms attested; the attestation rests on 9 cited sources — Cath Maige Tuired (The Second Battle of Mag Tuired), ed. and trans. Elizabeth A. Gray — the poisoned eye and its boyhood origin; the four lid-lifters; the sling-stone and the fall on the Fomorian host, Lebor Gabála Érenn, ed. and trans. R. A. S. Macalister — Balor mac Doit meic Néit; Cethlenn and the Dagda's death-wound; the Fomorian tribute, The Donegal oral tradition of Balor on Tory Island — the tower of Eithne, the Glas Gaibhnenn, the child cast into the sea (collected versions: O'Donovan's note in the Annals of the Four Masters, 1856; Curtin, Hero-Tales of Ireland, 1894; Larminie, West Irish Folk-Tales and Romances, 1893).

The Register Continues

Entry 59 of 397 in the Canonical Register. Around it: the temple's founding dispatch, the Restoration File on the marks themselves, the Resonance File on the archetype at work, and the Rulebook behind all of it.

Continue the register — previous entry: Baldr (read it) · next entry: Bꜣstt (read it).

The Canonical Register is written from the same canonical record as the lexicon itself. If a false form is missing from this page, it is because the evidence does not support calling it false — or because we have not seen it yet. Show us, with a citation, and the register will answer.